Militarism Without Strategy: How the 2025 National Security Document Institutionalizes Perpetual Conflict
by Peter
Rodgers | Dec
10, 2025 |
On December 4, 2025, the Trump administration released a document claiming to herald a “Golden Age of Peace”; yet
a careful reading reveals an entirely different picture: a roadmap for
institutionalizing chronic militarism and perpetuating conflict in a new form.
The new U.S. National Security Strategy portrays Trump as the “Peace President”
who has allegedly “achieved peace in eight global conflicts,” yet the same
document simultaneously authorizes the use of “lethal force” in other
countries, the expansion of military deployments at borders, and the
weaponization of economic tools. This apparent contradiction is not accidental;
it is part of a structural logic that links claims of non-interventionism with
the reality of expanding military dominance.
The 2025 National Security Strategy reveals this
operational redefinition of “peace through strength”—which in practice means
the continuation of militarism, though no longer through direct occupation but
through more complex mechanisms of regional control and economic
coercion—across three key dimensions: first, the revival of the Monroe Doctrine, declaring the Western Hemisphere America’s “natural
sphere of influence” and justifying military intervention against any “foreign
threat”; second, the securitization of migration, transforming borders into
military frontlines and legitimizing armed force deployment; and third, the
legitimization of unilateral military operations on foreign soil under the
banner of counter-terrorism and anti-cartel operations – all of which, beneath
the rhetoric of peace, institutionalize the continuation of American militarism
in a new guise.
The document crowns the president “The Peace
President” and claims he has quietly ended eight wars around the world. In the
very same pages, however, it calmly authorizes American forces to cross borders
and use “lethal force” inside other sovereign countries, expands military
deployments along entire continents, and turns economic tools into weapons of
coercion. This is not a contradiction by accident; it is the whole design. It
allows the government to say “we don’t want war” while building a system that keeps
everyone on the edge of one.
From the viewpoint of anyone who has spent a lifetime
studying real peace – the kind that lets children walk to school without fear,
the kind that keeps hospitals open and fields planted – this document does not
describe peace at all. It describes what scholars sadly call “structural
violence”: a quiet, everyday violence that does not always make headlines with
explosions, but that shortens lives all the same through fear, hunger, and the
slow grind of sanctions and threats.
At the heart of the strategy is a new version of an
old idea: the United States gets to decide what happens in the entire Western
Hemisphere, and no one from outside – China, Russia, Europe, anyone – is
allowed to have a say. They call it the “Trump Annex” to the Monroe Doctrine,
but to families in Mexico, Colombia, or Honduras it simply sounds like a new
declaration that their countries are not fully their own. The document says, in
plain words, that American troops may enter any neighbor’s territory to hunt
drug cartels, using deadly force whenever they judge it necessary, without
asking permission and without going through the United Nations or any court.
Drug cartels are criminals, yes. But turning a crime problem into a shooting
war across borders has been tried before in Latin America, and the only things it ever
produced were widows, orphans, and deeper hatred.
We have already seen the first signs: quiet navy raids
on boats far out at sea, warships gathering off the coast of Venezuela, rumors
of plans that look a lot like forced regime change. None of this is announced
as war. No congress votes. No Security Council resolution. It is war by another
name, hidden behind the phrase “border security.”
The document keeps repeating that America is done with
interventionism, that it is neither hawk nor dove, neither realist nor
idealist. Those words are carefully chosen so that any action – no matter how
aggressive – can be made to fit. When Washington likes an authoritarian ally in
the Middle East, it says “we don’t interfere in how others govern themselves.”
When it dislikes a government in Latin America, the same principle disappears
and the marines are suddenly an option. Rules, in this new vision, are not
principles; they are tools to be picked up or discarded depending on power and
convenience.
What we are left with is a strange kind of permanent
half-war: no official declarations, no clear battlefields, just an endless low
hum of menace. Troops on hair-trigger alert along borders that used to be
neighbors. Economies strangled until they gasp. This is not the architecture of
peace. It is the architecture of exhaustion, designed to keep everyone too
afraid or too poor to challenge the new order.
Real peace – the kind human beings have always longed
for – looks entirely different. It looks like a Guatemalan village where the
army is no longer needed because the land reforms finally happened. It looks
like a hospital in Sana’a or Gaza that never runs out of electricity. It looks
like two teenagers, one Palestinian and one Israeli, playing football together
without soldiers watching. It looks like a planet whose leaders decided that
burning the future to win today was no longer acceptable.
The 2025 National Security Strategy does not move the
world one millimeter closer to any of those things. It moves us further away.
For anyone who believes peace must mean justice,
dignity, and shared survival, this document is not a celebration; it is a
warning bell in the night. It shows how easily the word “peace” can be emptied
of meaning and filled instead with the sound of marching boots and the silence
of empty clinics.
The responsibility now falls to the rest of us –
ordinary people everywhere, communities, cities, smaller nations, movements of
conscience – to keep alive a different voice. A voice that insists real
security comes from schools that stay open, from fields that yield enough food,
from air that children can still breathe in fifty years.
If we let this gilded version of “peace” become the
only story told, then the golden age will belong not to humanity, but to fear.
And that is a future none of us should accept.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario